


what happened to you, to make you more girls than girls are?

by gonnafeelgood



Series: Wandering Hannah [2]
Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-13
Updated: 2013-03-13
Packaged: 2017-12-05 05:37:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/719471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gonnafeelgood/pseuds/gonnafeelgood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannah always lies to the people she loves and tells the truth to people she doesn't really know. It's complicated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what happened to you, to make you more girls than girls are?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lalejandra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalejandra/gifts).



> A sequel of sorts to [as girls go](http://archiveofourown.org/works/43655#work_endnotes). A Spring Break request from [lalejandra](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lalejandra/pseuds/lalejandra), a gift to her with love.

When Hannah visits LA now and runs into people from before, they always ask what she’s up to with this tone in their voice, like they know the answer is “not much.”

Hannah always lies. Not because she’s hiding a failed life, but because the possible success feels like something that she needs to protect, to hide in her hands like something precious and easily broken.

So she says “Oh, you know, living in a flyover state, just going to school.”

And, because her answer doesn’t give them any connections to producers, directors, actors, musicians, or famous people, they usually let the topic go and move on to discussing whatever it is that they care about that isn’t Hannah’s life.

People close to her ask what made Hannah apply to graduate school, with genuine curiosity, but also with more than a little confusion.

Hannah always lies to them, too.

She tells them that she took the GREs on a whim, that she was bored and decided to get a degree in History at the University of Montana (because it was close to Kalispell and she didn’t have to give up her house or her tentative friendships) and that she was bored after that and took the graduate tests just to see what she’d get.

In reality, the only time that Hannah was bored and aimless was when she got on that train in LA all of those years ago. Since stepping off that train, she’s stumbled into purpose over and over again. First, with landing in the most ridiculous small town in the world that was exactly what she needed. Then, she stumbled into a job that she knew she would quit within three years (and she did), but it is still the only real job that she’s ever had. Then, she stumbled into the right section of the used bookstore and realized that she kept buying the same kind of $2 paperbacks and, hey, maybe that meant something.

Hannah stumbled into this path, but it wasn’t because she was bored. It’s because this is the most interesting shit that she has ever thought about in her _life_.

*

When she applied to graduate school, Hannah didn’t tell anyone. She’d finished her bachelor’s degree the year before and was living in Kalispell full-time again, this time working in a casino to make a little cash. She didn’t love the job, but she knew (hoped) that it was temporary. She sent out applications to eight programs, five MA programs and three direct-to-PhD. She knew that getting into graduate school was a combination of luck, fit with an advisor, and grades/GREs. She had picked her advisor and had the grades and good enough GRE scores. The rest was down to her (historically spotty) luck.

The rejections came first – she expected some of the top-tier schools and, honestly, she couldn’t imagine herself at fucking Harvard anyway. But then, some of the MA programs sent acceptance letters, some with funding, some without. 

And then the letter from the Midwest school in the middle of fucking nowhere came – they wanted her. They wanted her to do her MA there, her PhD, and they wanted to pay her.

And that’s how a girl who escaped the Midwest as a child for the lights of Los Angeles _willingly_ returned to the land of corn, football rivalries, and endless skies.

*

Hannah doesn’t exactly date, but she does hook up with people from OkCupid every once in a while. In LA, online dating was like botox – everyone did it, nobody talked about it, and if anyone noticed that you were doing it, it was politely ignored. Necessary for maintenance, but kind of embarrassing.

In the Midwest? People swap their _usernames_. Or, at least, people in grad school do, since it’s not like they’re going to meet people in other places and it is pretty universally accepted that it is a terrible idea to fuck where you dissertate.

So Hannah meets a couple of guys who are … just guys.

Then, she starts meeting up with women. At first, it’s under the guise of “I need friends in this place and I don’t know how to meet them” (which is true) and “I’m not into women” (which is not). Eventually, though, Hannah finds a kind of nice balance between one night stands and casual … things that don’t really have any consequences, but feel nice for a night or two or a month or two.

It’s not exactly everlasting love, but it’s orgasms and Hannah has always been the pragmatic sort.

*

Hannah, Back-In-the-Day Hannah, didn’t love much of anything. Her family, Kelly, and a good vodka tonic with a Dexidrine chaser. That was pretty much all that she had for love and that was enough.

Back-In-the-Day Hannah wouldn’t even recognize Hannah now.

She loves her job. She’s a grader for this horrifying troll in the History department in a (ugh) Military History class, but grading is _easy_ because the professor is lazy and only gives multiple-choice tests, so she can always grade to any episode of any ABC Family tv show on Hulu (because grad school has made her already-terrible taste in pop culture downright abysmal). She loves her classes, though, and has finally figured out how much to talk and how much to listen in a seminar and even has (stupid) jokes with friends from the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program about poststructuralism and intersectionality.

She _loves_ having the space to think through ideas and write out explanations and really live with an idea for a little while before sharing it with other people.

She even loves the stupid conferences – she dresses up in this ridiculous corporate drag suit and flies across the country to speak for 10 minutes on a panel with other overdressed and underpaid graduate students. She drinks wine in awkward mixers and tries to meet the “right” people and realizes that her upbringing really prepared her to be a lot better at this part than other people.

It’s different, though, because while she’s manipulating and networking, she’s doing it by talking about her ideas and the work that she’s doing to surface contemporary women’s history as being central to examination of American identity formation.

For the first time in her life, people look at Hannah like she’s going to say something _interesting_ and that is a drug that makes cocaine pale in comparison.

When people at conferences ask Hannah why she came to grad school, she always says some version of the same thing.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about these ideas that I had, these things that I knew and that I wanted to figure out how to share. This is the best place to do that. This is the _only_ place to do that.”

She’s never lying.


End file.
